What is Studio Ghibli?

Studio Ghibli is an animation studio based in Koganei, Tokyo, founded in June 1985 by directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata with producer Toshio Suzuki, following the success of Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The separate page in this section on where the name Ghibli came from covers its origin in an Italian word for a hot desert wind, chosen for a studio that meant to blow through the industry.

The studio's catalogue is unusually concentrated: a little over twenty theatrical features across four decades, the great majority directed by Miyazaki or Takahata, drawn predominantly by hand at a time when the rest of the industry digitised. The films range from the pastoral My Neighbor Totoro and the war shadowed Grave of the Fireflies, released together in 1988, to the ecological epic Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, which remains the defining Japanese animated film worldwide.

Commercially, Ghibli built a structure no other anime studio matched. Tokuma Shoten, the publisher behind its founding, and later partners including television and distribution companies, turned the films into perennial catalogue titles in Japan, reissued across every home video format, supported by a museum, a theme park and one of the strongest character goods businesses in the country, all without sequels or a franchise slate in the Hollywood sense.

Recent history has been a transition. Miyazaki's announced retirement in 2013 and Takahata's death in 2018 closed the founding era, the studio produced television and short work through its quieter years, and Miyazaki returned with The Boy and the Heron in 2023. In the same year Ghibli became a subsidiary of Nippon Television, a step Suzuki framed as securing the studio's future beyond its founders.